Edward Baring is Associate Professor of Modern European History at Drew University and was a Guggenheim Fellow. He is author of The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945-1968, which won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas.
The virtues of Edward Baring's superb book are many. Converts to the Real demonstrates the importance of phenomenology--typically viewed as a philosopher's philosophy--not only for twentieth-century European intellectual life but for key social and political trends as well. Its great achievement is to merge two contemporary histories by showing how transformations in modern Catholic thought turned phenomenology into the continental philosophy.--Michael Gubser, author of The Far Reaches: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Social Renewal in Central Europe Converts to the Real tells an intriguing, valuable, and timely story about the religious leanings of European phenomenology, especially with respect to its associations with Neo-Scholasticism and the Catholic Church. Baring has done impressive archival research to create a narrative with considerable detail. An excellent book.--Kevin Hart, University of Virginia